


the scar that makes you one

by balphesian



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:51:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balphesian/pseuds/balphesian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That year, there’s an infestation of rats. (Or, the one where Silva isn’t a hero and never was.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the scar that makes you one

  
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.  
—John le Carré  


  


It’s 1996, the Chinese year of the rat. 

Tiago stares at the ceiling of his room and imagines scratching tallies onto the walls with his remaining fingernails, and would, if he could move. The air is cold; the new year should be arriving soon, and then the handover in July. 

He reaches up to touch his lips, his jaw, feeling the coarse prickle of weeks’ worth of hair against the pads of his bloodied fingers; he presses hard against his cheek, opens his mouth so he can push in, distend the flesh. Through the bruised skin, he can feel the blunt row of teeth—and his left molar, at the very back.

After a moment, he drops his hand. Then he sleeps—but not well, and whatever dreams he does have are more like waking nightmares, and he doesn’t miss them.

+

He’s seventeen when he enlists, eighteen when he transfers, and eighteen still when he signs on for nine years out of the garrison on active duty. He’s nineteen when they put him in Hong Kong with the Lilywhites for a two-year tour, and twenty-one when he first meets _her_ ; he’s thirty when he leaves China for a good few years (and thirty-something when he finally entertains the notion of going back). He’s forty-five when a gas explosion rips apart Vauxhall Cross from the inside out, and he’s forty-five when he kills _her_ —indirectly, maybe, but all the same, _dead_ —and he’s still forty-five and counting when he dies with a hunting knife in his back, and then he isn’t counting anymore; but that’s still fifteen more years of life than he’d been prepared to settle for.

He had thought the only cure to life was death, but he knows now that life is its own cure, its own poison. The fragility of human existence is so paper-thin, so tearable; reach out a finger, pull a trigger, flick a blade, and you can end it. Death is easy, so easy, too easy—but life is a cancerous thing, a wide road with only one destination. The only variable is how much time you have, how hard you fight back, and how easily you give in. The real pain lies in memory, and experience. The real pain is in not dying; the real pain is in being a survivor, and after all, that’s all humans are good for, in the end.

+

“ _Oye, guero_! Hey!”

He doesn’t turn to look at them, but he’s had practise; they jeer at him from the other side of the road, over passing cars, waving and calling, but he keeps his head forward and his gait steady, because he knows the rules of provocation. He knows what he looks like, he knows it every time he catches his reflection in a mirror and every time he doesn’t. His mother says he should be proud of it; _angelito_ she calls him, little angel, even though he’s a head taller than his peers, and thicker in the arms and chest with wiry muscle. 

Perhaps that’s why they don’t engage him, don’t dare cross that fat line of road. He’s a strange boy, light eyes and white hair and gentle movements, but always underneath a current of potential, willing to do what most cannot, despite being denied opportunities to prove himself. He is tall and he is fast and he can run, and there is a particular coldness in his eyes, not necessarily always communicated by their colour—he is simply _different._

(“Don’t you listen to them,” his mother had said, petting his fine hair, smoothing it out of his face. “Don’t you listen, they know nothing about you or me. You owe them nothing.”)

He watches her sometimes, watches her get dressed and put on makeup and once he caught her crying in front of her bureau, where it all ran sticky down her face, and she had to redo her mascara all over again with shaky strokes. When she leaves she gives him one kiss on each cheek and tells him to be good, that there’s a very silly show on the television he might like, and that she’ll be back later—and to be sure to go to bed soon, because it’s going to be an early morning for both of them.

He watches her leave and feels something twist inside. It feels like the burn of anger but it’s not, and it’s not at her, but it makes him feel like every inch of his skin is boiling.

“Hey! We asked you a question! Where are you going, back to your mamá?”

Once, when he was very young, he’d sat down where she’d sat after she left for the night and stared at the baffling collection of colours and powers and wondered what she needed them all for, if she only ever wore them where he couldn’t see. He had touched a finger into some blush and put it on his cheeks like war paint, both sides, bright streaks of pink. He thought he’d felt an inkling of understanding; but it had flown away before it could slot into place, so he’d washed his face in the dirty sink and went to watch television before bed. Even when, much later, he knows—he knows why, but he says nothing, and she seems happier for it. 

“He’s going home to his mamá, look. Is she waiting up for you? Have you been a good boy today? Will she reward you? Does she ever let you get your dick wet?”

They make vulgar motions with their hands and hips, sucking and slurping noises, laughing loudly. The sound is lost in the noise of engines, of traffic and pipe exhaust, but not before it reaches Tiago’s ears. (Passersby don’t look at the spectacle, but it’s hardly abnormal. Worse things happen daily in this part of Madrid than a gaggle of school kids taunting an outsider; it’s normal, it’s nothing.)

He keeps walking until they lose interest. They wave him off, kicking at the loose cement on the kerb, and then turn around, but Tiago’s hands are tight on his bag, knuckles sharp and stretched white.

+

He wakes up tied to a chair, with a bag over his head.

His ankles are bound, as well as his wrists, but not his torso. He strains against the bonds immediately, but his head’s too clouded and too light, and he stops struggling before he passes out again. It comes back to him in drowsy waves—the woman, the syringe (she’d let him put his hand up her skirt and then dosed him with something in the neck, must have yanked out his wire when he’d kissed her throat.) But he has to applaud their underhanded ingenuity; they must have known they wouldn’t have gotten him in a fair fight. Not that he plays fair.

Someone rips the bag off his head, and he blinks back the sudden strain, the flood of light. 

The room isn’t big, but it’s clearly meant for interrogation, all brick and dark save for two bare fluorescent lights suspended from wires directly above him, throwing the rest of the place into sickly darkness. The floor is chipped. There are no windows. He can hear nothing but the hum of a fan, somewhere, and then, a voice:

“Welcome, Agent Rodriguez. I hope you’re comfortable. We tried to be gentle.”

The voice is distinctly Chinese-accented, pleasantly low, with a fluent grasp on English. Tiago catches thick vowels and soft consonants in the words; British-educated, like himself. From what he can see, the man is dressed in a very fine navy suit—Zegna, looks like—cufflinks, oxfords, and comb-over, with a thin, sallow face. Mid-forties at a guess. 

Tiago blinks away the dullness of his senses, straightens up, and looks him in the eye. This man doesn’t move like an agent; he moves like he has money, but that could mean any one number of things. Chinese spy, or well-informed bureaucrat. (It’s the eight or so men behind him who look like they could deal some real damage, all muscle and guns shoved into the waistbands of their trousers.)

“You didn’t try very hard,” Tiago replies levelly, after a moment.

His cheekbone explodes with pain, and the fuzziness returns tenfold; he reels back in the chair, blinking, and pants with his mouth open until the dark corners of the room fade out and come back into focus.

“I will let you know when you can speak,” the man says, straightening the cuff on the wrist that had just backhanded him. “My name is Qiáng. I work for the MSS. Given your considerable technological prowess, I assume you’re smart enough to know why you’re here.”

Tiago’s jaw clenches reflexively, and twinges. “Thank you, I am.”

The next hit is just as hard, but Tiago’s ready for it, and he turns his head in time to turn it into a glancing blow. Pain blossoms again on the side of his face, stinging his eye and the corner of his mouth. He licks at his newly split slip, spits blood onto the floor, and fights to stay awake. It’s harder than he’d have thought; the remains of the drug is probably still kicking around in his system, making his head heavy and his fingers twitch.

Qiáng stands in front of him, and folds his hands behind his back. “Please be quiet, Mr Rodriguez.” 

Tiago just breathes through his nose and watches with blurry eyes. 

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice? We did. We don’t like sticky fingers in our databases, especially British fingers. And I’m afraid that means we can’t let you go without finding out what you know. I would tell you it’s nothing personal, but—you have been of particular interest to us for some time now, and we try not to make a habit of throwing away potentially helpful assets. So, here is my bargain. You can either tell us everything, or we will break you until you do. If you give us good information we will let you go back to your people with... a few scrapes, almost as good as new. If you give us false information, we will kill you. Does that sound reasonable?”

Tiago says nothing, listening. A muscle twitches in his neck. Tendons push out and tense.

“Very well.” Qiáng waves a guard over. “You have one week to give us your answer, Mr Rodriguez, and then we’ll stop being kind.”

Two men drag him to a room—past 99, 100, to—101, the plaque reads. They strip him of his clothes and leave. The cell is small, but there’s a metal bench on the far side, bolted to the wall and to the floor so he can’t use it for anything other than sitting or sleeping. A red plastic bucket sits innocuously in the corner; Tiago’s eyes flick to it, assessing, and then travel elsewhere.

He runs his hands systematically over the walls to check for cracks or holes in the cement. There are none. The floor is similarly smooth, if stained in places; there are no pebbles or small slivers of wood or glass. Nothing. He counts ten steps from one end of the cell to the other, and eleven on the opposite axis. The air is cool, but there’s no vent. No room for so many men—it’s a holding cell, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. 

Naked, he sits on the bench and leans his skull against the wall. His breath escapes him in a low hum, whistling past his teeth on its way out. The dull aching throb of his bruised face is a steady metronome, a persistent reminder: _You. Are. Fucked._

+

“Hey, Tiago,” the boy says, all faux-conspiratorial, trying and failing to hide the vicious curl of his lips, “Hey, if I wanted to pay your mamá to sit on my dick, how much do you think she’d do it for? Not much, huh?”

Tiago shoves him out of the way with an arm and keeps walking. They crossed the line, the road, today, and they’re so proud of themselves for it, because they think he’ll try and ignore them—they think he’s harmless, despite his appearance, his height, because he’s ignored them all before, won’t raise a hand or his voice to retaliate.

“C’mon, _c’mon_ , you must know her rates, she probably sucks you off all the time.”

Something snaps inside his chest. Tiago stops, turns, can’t ignore them any longer. He levels Ramón with a cold, even gaze.

“If you don’t stop talking about my mother I’m going to kick your teeth in.”

Ramón pauses, struck for a moment with the sincerity behind Tiago’s threat, and then his walls come back up. He smiles, wide and ugly, and he shoves Tiago backward into the brick wall adjacent. “Oh yeah? Could you do that? You’re a fairy boy, _angelito_ , is that it? I bet you fight just like your mamá, I bet you’d rather suck my dick.”

Tiago’s fist collides with Ramón’s face with a satisfying noise, a thick _crack_ of skin and bone breaking. Feeling the sting in his knuckles, he pushes forward and knocks Ramón to the ground. He’s choking him before he really knows what he’s doing, and there’s blood everywhere, all on his hands, under his fingernails, smearing into Ramón’s mouth like jelly.

Ramón’s friends drag Tiago off and hold him down, shoving his face into the concrete of the road while Ramón screams hoarsely at him, spitting blood and mucus down his shirt. Tiago struggles against them, kicking out with vicious anger, manages to catch one of them in the thigh—he goes down, for a second—clawing his hands against any flesh he can reach, leaving angry red marks in skin and catching fabric against his fingertips. He doesn’t know what’s happening but he knows he wants to hurt them, and not just for what they’ve said, but for what they will say, and all they’ll do. Ramón recovers himself, settles on Tiago’s back and slams his head onto the pavement, spattering his hair with red. His bloody nose drips onto the back of Tiago’s neck, but all he can think is how he wants to rip Ramón’s lips off with his teeth.

“Not such an angel now, _maricón_ ,” Ramón hisses in his ear. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

Tiago almost manages to unseat him before sirens sound. Ramón looks up, and his hold on Tiago’s hair loosens—Tiago bucks up, but the other two slam him back down again. Light explodes behind Tiago’s eyes and he feels faint, queasy, and groans in angry nausea.

“Later,” Ramón promises, and runs.

The police find him sitting on the sidewalk, staunching his own bloody nose with his shirt, stained black.

At home, his mother holds him and tries not to let him see that she’s crying, smiles at him fondly even through a wet film of tears. “Tiago, no. Never again. You need to be a good boy. You can’t do that again, Tiago, or they’ll take you away from me.”

“I’m sorry, Mamá,” he says, and doesn’t mean it. 

She kisses him on the forehead. “Hush, no-no-no, don’t be sorry. Just be careful.”

Later that week school finishes for the year, and she tells him to pack because they’re going to his grandmother’s for a month in the summer. Before he’d finished his first cycle of primary school, they’d gone each year—because they could afford it, mostly, but in the years past when he’d asked she’d told him they couldn’t because they had to spend that money on food and rent. He’d nodded and hadn’t thought that much more about it, despite a lingering sense of childish disappointment; the island, he thinks, is a form of escape that only he and his mother need know about, another world, wrapped on all sides with water and clouds. 

His grandmother’s island isn’t very big, but it’s big enough for Tiago, who knows every inch of it by heart—from the small forest to the beach and the docks, the soft rises of the dunes, the way the sand feels in between his toes and how coarse the vegetation can be when you step on it with bare feet, or scrape past it while running flat out. She had never wanted for money, his grandmother, and liked to spoil him whenever he visited her; Tiago doesn’t have much use for what she gives him, but she seems satisfied with the reserved little smiles he offers her in return, the way he holds her gifts in his hands and look them over as if trying to determine how they work, even when they have no purpose.

It seems like too short a time there, the days spent walking and digging his fingers into the sand and dozing in the wide hammock, under the shade of the palm trees. It’s a paradise Tiago never wants to lose, this small contained world. Nothing, nobody, can touch him here.

+

They give him a slice of bread and a cup of rice and half a glass of tap water daily for a week. On the seventh day, they give him more food and water than he needs, a plate full of cheap noodles and a full glass. Tiago has no choice but to eat it all; wasting provided nutrition would be an idiotic oversight. He washes his hands with a little water from his cup, rubbing them together, feeling the grease slip-slide against his fingers.

Either they’re playing nice while they try and negotiate with his supervisors at Station H, or they’re trying to lull him into a false sense of security. Both, probably; when agents go missing, MI6 notices, and they do something about it—even if this is the first time Tiago’s allowed himself to be caught. This particular interrogation suite can’t be State Security sanctioned. There would’ve been an operation to get him out by now if they knew when he’s being kept. (Then again, you can’t really assume anything with the Chinese. Not when it comes to grievous breaches of security.)

Tiago almost laughs to himself, at the futility. He’s in for a shit time.

After Tiago finishes his meagre meal, Qiáng opens the door. He’s flanked by two men who each take a corner of the room. Tiago remains sitting, fingertips pressed together, head bowed.

Qiáng clears his throat. Beige suit today, blue tie. 

“So. We’ve given you a week. What will it be?”

Tiago looks at the floor for a very long moment, every inch of his skin prickling.

“I will remind you that if you refuse to cooperate—” 

“—You’ll make me wish I was dead?” He raises his head to look Qiáng in the eye, and his mouth curls into a mocking smile. “You’re several years late for that, Mr Qiáng, but thank you for the considerate thought.”

“And your answer?”

Tiago gives him a piteous look. “I really am sorry to disappoint.”

“I assumed as much,” Qiáng says, sighing. “They did tell me Messervy’s golden boy would not be so easily coerced, but I felt it prudent to offer you a way out. Just in case you weren’t as golden as they said you were.”

He smiles like a knife. “Oh, I’m not.”

“Suit yourself, Mr Rodriguez.”

Qiáng leaves.

The remaining men kick his stomach until he vomits, and then they keep going.

+

He’s eleven when there’s a knock on the door. It’s early morning, half past six. Tiago opens it. He smells like sweet butter and simmered bacon, but his fingers are clean of sweat and food. When his mother hadn’t shown up in the night, he’d taken it upon himself to make breakfast. It was sparse, but good. 

The policeman asks his name, and then asks to come inside. 

Tiago nods mutely, feeling his stomach tear itself apart, and then re-twist into knots; on the moth-eaten sofa, the policeman tells him that he’ll be going to stay with his grandmother for a while. He doesn’t cry, but he kicks the television in after the policeman leaves; he doesn’t cry when some of the shards cut into his shin and make him bleed. He doesn’t get to stay long enough to read the paper, the one that would tell him that his mother died of a broken neck, a ring of bruises around her throat, semen staining her thighs (well, that part wasn’t mentioned; but Tiago knows, can see it in his young mind). It doesn’t seem important to cry. Nothing seems important.

He doesn’t cry at her funeral. It’s closed-casket, and not many people come. He can pretend there’s no body inside. He can pretend it’s for someone else. He can pretend his mother finally got out, and she did, in a way; she’s gone, and maybe that’s a good thing. But he’s still here. 

He is no good thing.

His grandmother rests his hand on his shoulder when they leave. The priest looks at him with something like pity, or acceptance. Tiago just feels empty.

+

That year, there’s an infestation of rats. 

Tiago watches them scurry around the grass near the treeline, and pokes at one’s corpse just off one of the dirt paths down to the shoreline. It looks like a bird got at it, a great gash in its stomach where its guts have blackened in the heat of the sun. His grandmother finds him bent over it, looking, and she shoos him away. “Don’t look at that, Tiago,” she says, her face scrunched up with narrow disgust. “Don’t touch it, it’s unhealthy.”

They seem everywhere, in everything. He’s not scared, but he has to watch where he runs, has to make sure he doesn’t crush one beneath his heel when he’s sprinting from one end of the island to the other. His grandmother tells him they came over on on fishing boat—not a whole host, but a few, and then they had babies. Rats grow quickly, she tells him. Especially when they have something good to eat, like coconut.

She shows him how to trap them. He helps her put down the coconut on the lid and listens when she tells him how they’ll come sniffing for it. He watches as they wander ever closer, and then as the fall into the oil drum. Every few days, he comes to look—peering in at the steadily growing seething mass of fur and fat tails, crawling over each other, scrabbling at the walls trying to get out. It’s an unholy noise, their pathetic (desperate) squeaking, and after a while Tiago stops coming to see, finding the sound unbearable.

One day, he passes the oil drum, having grown curious. There’s no noise coming from within, no frantic scratching or tiny screams. When he peers inside, a wave of stench rises up and into his nose and mouth, and he vomits off into the sand before he can stop himself, his tongue numb with nausea. He finds his grandmother, and she tells him that that’s what happens—when you trap so many living things together who need to eat to survive, they will eventually turn on each other. Survival of the fittest, she explains, and pulls on a pair of gardening gloves.

“But there are only two left,” he says, looking in again. His grandmother rests her hands on the lid of the oil drum and nods at him.

“There are always survivors. Eventually they’ll eat each other. Help me with this, there’s a good boy.”

They hoist it up, and tip it over gently. After a minute, the two rats scramble out of their noxious, rotted hell, over all the bloated bodies and maggots and flies, screaming off back onto the island. Tiago watches them go, the stench of death burning in his nostrils.

+

They take his nails first. When they grow back, they take them again.

After the first beating, Tiago is left alone for a few days to heal. Every day, they give him one measure of rice and water. It’s not enough to satisfy his stomach, but it’s enough to live on; he can fight the hunger and the emptiness, but the pain is harder to ignore. They’d left him with one cracked rib and a body littered with bruises—there might be some internal bleeding, but nothing serious—and he’d spent an hour afterward just lying there trying to categorise what they’d done to him and how to work around it, making invisible ticks on a list. Toes first, a few sprained, cut up feet—legs, fine, knees, scrape—hips, fine. Torso, not fine. Arms, fine. Head, fine. Hands, not fine.

It’s impossible to keep physically fit when someone wants to beat you down, but despite the initial aches, and in between beatings, he finds a way to stand and walk circuits around his room for at least thirty minutes each day. When they find out what he’s doing, they break an ankle, so he stops. A day later, they have someone come in to set it so they don’t have to bear all his weight the next time they drag him out and put him in the chair; he watches as the man’s fingers deftly rearrange the break and press all his bones back in place, and he doesn’t yell, but an angry, involuntary stinging begins behind his eyes, and he’s breathing hard by the time the doctor sets the splint and ties the binding off, chest heaving.

They don’t break anything else after that, maybe because it’s too much of a fucking bother to patch up what they want to crack. Tiago knows they’re holding out, that they want to do this patiently. It’s all about the build-up, and then the break-down, and when his walls crack they want to be there to catch all the information that floods out of him, sift through it with their greedy little hands until they find what they need to stab the dagger into Britain’s back.

He’s not going to tell them shit, though, he’s been trained too well for that, and even if he did know anything, he’s just an agent. He’s just a weapon. He goes, does, is what he’s told, except for the times he isn’t, and, well—he already knows more about China than he does Britain. 

But if they knew that, if they knew the full extent of what he knew, they probably would have killed him already.

+

When Tiago is thirteen, he and his grandmother move to England. A change of pace, she tells him. Tiago is fine with it; Madrid had offered him nothing he couldn’t take elsewhere, and he knows the real reason has nothing to do with preference and everything to do with money. 

Something changes in him that had lain dormant—a burning want, and a need, to sharpen himself into something dangerous. Physically, he grows, his voice deepening and splitting, his hair going from white-blond to wheat; his mind reaches out and consumes whatever it can find. He had found his schooling boring and thus didn’t have to try, though he did anyway, because his grades always seemed to matter to his mother, who’d told him he’d go far. He believed her, but it was only because he’d had no time for false modesty, still doesn’t, knowing himself to be sharp in the mind—unrecognized, but unwavering. 

English proves to be a welcome challenge. It’s more more stocky and stuttered than Spanish, all hard edges and thick vowels, but Tiago learns it well and handles it even better in practise, carrying on solid conversation in months and even becoming rudimentarily fluent in a year. The language becomes a tool. It’s not something he would say he enjoys—there is nothing in English that cannot be said twice as beautifully in Spanish—but it is useful, the knowledge, more useful than any expensive knick-knack you can turn over in your hands and place on a shelf somewhere to gather dust. Sometimes he dreams in it. In those dreams he is no longer Tiago; he is something more.

Over the years, Tiago becomes leaner, taller, sharper. His smiles become easier, his body language more fluid, moving like liquid through every obstacle, around every threat. He’d been treated like an outsider before—the concept is not new, and the taunts slide off him like water, though he catalogues each face, every name, offering them bright, pale smiles in return—each one a promise. He learns how to become unsettling, how to make men fear femininity. He learns how to act, and how most easily to throw someone’s guard. He learns how to break bones. He puts a mugger’s face into a wall one night in South London, using his own force against him; he licks the blood from his lip and wipes it from his chin and grins, thrilled with the heat of a good fight, laughing at the heady quality of it. He remembers vividly the days when he’d run across the island; ten minutes of pure, childish joy, the rush of triumph. 

Afterward, he slips into a club full of smoke and tight jeans and leather jackets and allows himself to just lose it, his hand clutching desperately the back of someone’s—it could be anyone’s—head as they swallow him down under the harshness of a single swinging light bulb. He’s still impossibly young but he doesn’t feel like he is; here is something he can fill himself with, pour every tremor into the empty places inside until his seams all split and he’s bursting.

He reads voraciously, about life, and art, about expectations, and the inevitability of death, the decay of time; pessimism, disillusionment. _Ozymandias, king of kings._ He sits down at an Commodore 64C hooked up to a 10804S monitor and learns how to write in every strain of BASIC, in Pascal and FORTRAN on his off hours. It comes to him so easily, more easily than English, like slipping into an island paradise of electrical shadows. He guts one and puts it back together again, makes it better. He writes programs and executes them on a whim, watching bystanders who think their files have been deleted; watching their panic and then their relief when they realise nothing has been compromised, when they realise how much they depend on something they know nothing about. With a computer, he is God; without a computer, he’s a weapon. 

Once you know something’s inner workings, you control it completely; he learns until he _knows_ , without a shadow of a doubt, the insides and outsides of the future, what he knows will rule the world someday (is well on its way to doing so).

At seventeen, he’s eligible for British citizenship, and when he’s naturalised, he sits down with his grandmother and tells her he’s joining the army. He thinks he might have inherited that from her, all her cool practicality; they were never too close to begin with, and neither feels separation is worth shedding tears over. Tiago knows she recognises him for what he’s becoming, and what he wants to do, needs for himself. He thinks she might be proud in her own way—a way his mother would never have been, with her quiet whisperings of concern, her staunch need to smother without smothering and comfort by way of apology.

“As long as you’ll be happy there,” his grandmother had said distantly, stroking the backs of his knuckles. Tiago had merely smiled, but it hadn’t reached his eyes. It isn’t—and never will be—about happiness.

He begins his junior training at Harrogate, and he transfers to Catterick after forty-nine weeks, settling effortlessly into the demanding routine. It’s like he was born for this life, digging his fingers into the meat of it and hoisting his way toward some unreachable pinnacle that others might call perfection—but it’s not, it’s only adaptation, the will to blend and move and kill with utter precision and control. Being the best doesn’t make you any friends, but it does catch a lot of attention; his COs watch him closely, note his progress, give him hard looks and harder tasks in the hopes that it might bring him down a peg, but he never relents. He drives forward and digs in deep like a dagger, pushes his limits and apologises for nothing.

The computers there are still clunky, despite being the newest models; Tiago knows better than to ask for one of his own, but his fingers always find a home there, on the keys, and he sinks down into that world as easily as if it were water. He always leaves things exactly as he found them; nobody knows what he does or how he does it, and that’s fine. That’s more than fine.

+

At first it’s just the beatings, which Tiago’s been conditioned for; he’s handled worse, can handle worse than a few slaps to the head and some broken bones. Sometimes they use metal rods and drain pipes and once even with a pry bar, just one swing, to his kneecap. The blistering agony had taken him down in an instant, and even though the blow hadn’t shattered his knee, it had felt like someone had stabbed a hot knife right through it and twisted until the tendons snapped and popped off like frayed rope at a children’s fair. (It could be worse but it isn’t, it’s all physical, not mental, and the suspense is wickedly sly, sneaking up inside of him and making him wary and jumpy as a fucking rabbit.)

He lies there panting, waiting for the next assault, but it doesn’t come for two more days. And he has to give them that, he supposes, breathing in the fine dust and the smell of his own shit; he has to praise their unwavering dedication to being patient, if not their unpredictability. Some days they don’t even ask for information; they just start in on him. Tiago almost respects them for it. He feels like maybe he should be taking notes to bring back to Station H, even if it’s been two weeks and nobody’s come for him yet; he should be writing all this down, he thinks fuzzily, he should send a memo. He smiles, but it’s only teeth and bloody gums.

+

When he graduates, he’s assigned to Hong Kong almost immediately. He ships off to his new home in a plane with a hundred other infantrymen—Wickers, Bristow, Okri, Mansfield, Fitzpatrick, among those he knows he’ll be rooming with. They land in HKG before setting up in Perowne Barracks and for a solid week with the Gurkhas, where they do nothing but train and pass the time with American gangster films and take-out and dog-eared novels that get stained with rings of tea and coffee. Hong Kong is beautiful in a way that Madrid never was and that London could only hope to be, a city of mirrors and lights, so vast in the daylight and cut edges in the darkness, a neon spider’s web of infrastructure. Tiago finds it immediately appealing; in with the new, out with the old-fashioned, and he after he sets aside the VHS tape and turns off the television, he watches it glitter at him through the window in open invitation.

They go out on a Friday evening to the gaudiest club they can find after a day’s worth of sparring and hard physical work. Tiago fucks a girl with his fingers outside the grungy toilets with _True Faith_ pounding in his ears, his hand shoved down the front of her too-tight trousers. She plays with his hair and sighs when she comes wet and warm against his palm, shuddering, and offers to blow him. He turns her down with a generous kiss, and minutes later ends up with his mouth on someone else’s dick, sharp tile digging into his knees, the back of their rough, callused hand caressing his hollowed cheek, the stretch of his lips. 

They all stumble back to the barracks at piss o’clock in the morning looking thoroughly fucked-out. Wickers’ lips are pink too; Tiago eyes him over a shared nightcap, but they’re all too exhausted to speak, and so they collapse on the nearest stretch of furniture to sleep it off, smelling of sex and the bitter tang of alcohol. 

The year passes quickly, and then another. They aren’t confined to the base, but it’s home, at least, for now; they run drills, laps. Field trips to shooting ranges. Tail jobs for drug deals, dead drops, deliveries, security details. Tiago knows they’re there as backup, a contingency plan just in case the Chinese get uppity with their British occupants, as it’s been for years and years, but for God’s sake, he could be put to so much better use than this.

Then, one day, he finds Wickers sucking off some smackhead behind one of their favorite diners and just smiles, doesn’t say anything, just _knows_ , and Wickers looks at him over counters and behind turned backs and through foggy windows with this nervous sort of hate. Tiago’s never had the opportunity to blackmail anyone before, and this little power trip feels as good as he imagines Wickers’ mouth might. In fact, it’s a little better; it’s long-term. Sex had never really been Tiago’s hang-up. Apparently he’s one of the only ones.

And that’s it, he supposes. The beginning of the end.

He never ends up fucking Wickers, and Wickers seems to forget about it. But Tiago knows. He makes it his business to know, not just about Wickers’ little thing for getting on his knees for strangers and letting them smack him around like the whore he probably wishes he could have stayed; Okri’s got a gambling problem, no surprise there, Mansfield even tries to shake him out of it a few times, because that’s what friends do for friends with debts; and Mansfield, he’s got a wife back home who cheats with the father next door, and Mansfield tells himself he’s okay with that without ever truly accepting that it’s true. Tiago had spoken with her once, when she’d visited the compound last year; sweet, kind, wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, and he’d hadn’t mentioned it, and she smiled at him and Mansfield like nothing was wrong (and nothing was). It’s almost startling how much can pass under the radar, how much people can ignore if they decide they don’t like what it is.

And it’s so garden variety, isn’t it, all these little problems with no immediate solutions, all different parts and walks of lives that Tiago honestly has no interest in, beyond the fact that he could topple them all with a little effort and some motivation. But he has none, beyond a passing notion of _I could if I wanted to_ , and that’s dangerous; that’s not what good army boys think. He wonders if he’ll ever want to. Maybe. Sometime. 

But they’re nobodies. What he’d ruin wouldn’t serve him at all. There would be nothing gained but vicious satisfaction, and that’s—that’s just emotion. There’s no gain. It’s fleeting and meaningless, like sex, like anything in meatspace. It cannot be documented, except in memory. But memories change. Memories can be fucked out, knocked out, erased with the mind; it’s nothing concrete, not like numbers or lines of code, because once you put something down electronically, it stays. The only margin of error is the human fault. Tiago wants something worth striking down.

But he’s young yet; he’s patient, too, and one morning, he wakes with a headache to the shrill ring of their landline. 

“Oi, Angelface,” Mansfield says, holding out the phone half-naked with a toothbrush in his mouth. “It’s for you.”

Tiago takes the call.

It’s almost unsurprising to hear that the head of Station H wants to see him, that he’d been noticed by MI6 perhaps even before he’d been shipped overseas—those glances between officers hadn’t been meaningless, and he hadn’t been modest enough to assume they were for anyone else but him. The Lance Corporal on the other end of the line isn’t congratulatory, just perfunctory; _report to the Murray Building at 0900 hours. Plainclothes._ Tiago dresses quickly in a jacket and jeans and combs his hair back and looks himself in the mirror and offers a blinding smile that doesn’t waver, doesn’t change at all. 

A young, mousey-looking man meets him in the lobby, looks him up and down, and brings him to a very plain office on the top floor. Before he goes in he’s scanned for weapons, bugs, and then let through. He’s not sure what he’s expecting—a private debriefing on a delicate subject, maybe, or the question of his allegiance, which seems to be under constant review—but who can expect a happy accident? He could never have predicted _her._

(If he’d known then—well. Things might have been different, but he didn’t, so they aren’t.)

Tiago evaluates her almost instantaneously, between one slow blink and the next, and in the same instant, he realises that he is utterly outmatched. Her presence in the room overshadows him with unapologetic enormity despite her petite stature, her short (graying) hair, and her modest, sensible clothing. This is a woman who could hand him his balls on a platter and make him eat them, should she feel so inclined; he knows the type, because he is the type, and it—strikes some kind of chord, because something childishly visceral begins to rise in him, something new and twisted. This will be a pissing match, however lengthy or subtle, if only because she reminds him of the man who could be, but isn’t. 

He shuts it down before it can rear its ugly head and force his mouth into something other than a practised, pleasantly bland smile; instead, he approaches the desk at which she sits with even steps. It appears temporary, since there’s no name plaque or note paper or a miscellaneous paper weight, and the room is empty besides. There’s no chair facing the desk, nothing to instill false comfort. Murray Building is not Station H, and there’s no reason to assume he’ll ever know where it really is—but he’d like to.

He stands at rest, waiting for her to speak, and after a moment, she does.

“You’re wasted in the infantry,” she tells him flat out, sizing him up with eyes like daggers. “I’ve seen your file. You’re a genius. And not only that, you’ve done more good work at the junior level than half our agents in the field right now.”

He doesn’t pause. It’s all true, after all. 

“Thank you.”

“Have you given any thought to joining the service?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I see you’ve only recently become a citizen, but—you are twenty-one now, and so you pass basic muster. Frankly I’m disappointed we had to wait this long; I would have taken you the moment you were deployed, but unfortunately there are still some rules we must follow.”

Tiago doesn’t even blink. She continues. “You’ll have to take the drug tests, of course, and undergo another background check. Which I’m sure you’ll pass with flying colours.” She looks at him icily. “Won’t you.”

“Of course.”

“The truth is, we need new blood. Someone who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty. You’re the best soldier the army’s seen in a long time, and I’m willing to jump through a few hoops for you because of it. Take it or leave it, Mr Rodriguez; it’s your choice. But I highly recommend you take it.”

The corners of Tiago’s lips twitch up, just a little, and his head tilts a degree to the left—it’s almost coy, the set of his mouth, the faintest hint of amusement. “And if I don’t?”

“I do hate to disappoint you, but you’re not the only candidate for this position. There are plenty more fish in the sea. And some who have even attended university.” She gives him a pointed look.

They both know that assuming he’s any less intelligent than they are just because he doesn’t have a degree is a mistake, but of course she’s only trying to needle him.

“And yet I’m still your first choice.”

She smiles thinly. “Not for very much longer, I’m afraid.”

She opens a drawer in the desk and withdraws a file. “Everything you need to know is in here. It’s nothing sensitive; just some rudimentary paperwork. The application is included. If you have any interest in continuing this line of conversation, fill it out and bring it back to me in one week’s time.”

She slides it across the desk to him. He bends forward to take it, but she keeps the tips of her fingers on the document, pinning it to the table.

“And—Rodriguez.”

Tiago looks up. Her eyes pierce him through.

“You have a very promising career ahead of you. Don’t cock it up.” 

She lets go. Tiago takes the file and tucks it under his arm and turns to leave, but it’s only after he’s out of the building that he realises she never gave him her name.

+

The day the guards filter in with a bucket of water and a rag is the day Tiago realises, with an ugly shudder, that they’ve been going easy on him. He fights back this time, tooth and missing nail, so they need to knock him out just to strap him down to the bench. His skull hits the floor with a sickening crack and he wakes up without any air, and briefly he wonders if it’s because they punctured both his lungs—but then the wet slosh of water splashes into his eyes and he realises someone’s pouring it into his mouth, over his face, and he can’t see through the thick weave of the gray rag but it doesn’t matter because he can’t breathe, can’t even swallow, can’t fight back the panic, because he’s drowning.

Four minutes, he tells himself. Four minutes’ oxygen deprivation will fuck up your brain, make you stupid, and anything after that—

They let him breathe after what seems like forever, and he stares up liquid-eyed, chest heaving, sucking up air until he has to turn his head and vomit. There’s water in his lungs, he can feel it, so he can only cough and splutter until the next round, and then he passes out. 

He doesn’t know if he dies. They never tell him if he does. All he knows is darkness, and then light, and never-ending cycle of waking up and falling asleep, until sometimes he wonders if one time he won’t wake up, and if every time he’s conscious enough to take more pain, it’ll be his last. That’s almost preferable to this. 

—But no, he tells himself; they wouldn’t just let him die. That’d be too kind.

+

He takes it. Of course he takes it, he’s not an idiot.

The field fitness evaluations are no challenge, and the psychological evaluations—well, he doesn’t put much stock in psychoanalysis, but he’s no more abnormal than any other trained killing machine, and they seem satisfied with the answers he gives them. (More than satisfied, maybe even surprised, but he’s not looking too closely.) By the time he’s back in front of her, there’s something dark and electric sparking in his veins, a promise of what’s to come—what he’ll do for _her_ , not for England, not for Queen and Country, but for her, for the nameless woman with the frown lines and the heels and a face like a falcon, far-seeing eyes and all, because he wants to know what makes her tick.

He knows he’s in before she even speaks.

“Since you are officially no longer part of the British army, you’ll no longer be staying in the barracks. I recommend you find a place of your own. Make the necessary arrangements and say your goodbyes, if you have anyone to say them to.”

And that’s that. She looks at him coolly; continues without missing a beat. “You understand the risks involved?”

“Every one,” he says. 

“Good.” She stands. “I don’t need to tell you that if you attempt to defect, or if you betray this organisation, I’ll have you summarily killed. Your service records are clean—clean enough—and I’d like to keep them that way.”

No she wouldn’t. “You don’t trust me.” 

“Don’t be stupid, of course not. Tell me one reason why I should. Trust is earned, Mr Rodriguez, it isn’t a party favour, and some of us never learn how to give it.” She looks at him shrewdly. “I’ve arranged an appointment with the station dentist at three o’clock Monday; you’re to report to him and then await further orders.”

She hands him a padded manila envelope over the desk. He opens it, draws out the gun, checks it over. It’s a standard-issue Glock 17, a layman’s weapon, nothing fancy. He puts it back in the envelope and tucks it under his elbow. “A dental plan? So you _do_ take care of your own.”

She smiles thinly. “Standard procedure. A precaution we take with all our agents.”

A day later, Tiago goes, and Dr Weir pulls his back left molar and shows it to him.

“The new one will be a cyanide pill,” he says, holding the new, false tooth up to the light while the hole in Tiago’s gums slowly soaks the gauze red. “Just in case you ever need a way out. Clever little idea, wish I’d thought of it.” 

He sets it down on the counter, back in its little plastic container. “You’ll need eight to ten days to recover before I install it, so I’m going to give you something for the pain in the meantime. Open, please, thank you—”

The dental implant goes smoothly, but even with anesthetic, it’s about a month before Tiago’s mouth is healed enough to let him back on active duty. By then he’s secured a new flat, bought himself a computer with his employee advance, and rooted up what of Station H’s databases that have been digitised; _she_ has one husband, two kids back in England, an exceptionally cutthroat accounting history. Her assistant is unmarried and entirely straight-laced, right down to his Oxbridge education and public service record; dull, boring. Employee records, project files, letters and correspondence, report summaries, blah blah blah; it’s all so easy, they don’t even know he’s there, and he knows more about them than they do about him.

—and a list of currently active double-Os. No names, just numbers.

Now that’s interesting.

He runs his tongue over his new tooth, testing; it feels different, foreign against the side of his cheek, but it’ll fade in time. If he ever gets into a situation where he might need it—well, that would be interesting too, wouldn’t it? But not surprising. He’s not stupid enough to assume he’s not still expendable; that’s the job description. They want him—they _need_ him—but he’s a pawn, that’s all, that’s all he ever will be. The lowest rung on the ladder, and the most dangerous. 

Not one day later, he receives his first assignment.

Tiago’s a born actor; he performs every minute there are eyes on him, slipping into a theatrical persona that is just as much a part of him as his clothes, the peculiar shade of his eyes and hair, the food he chooses to eat and the books he chooses to read. He pulls his most convincing faces and imagines her watching him behind every tinted glass window, every black-eyed camera, rating his performance by how much the tilt of her mouth rises or falls. He doesn’t get to see his scores, never does, none of his kind do, but he knows—in his _core_ he knows—that he is more impressive than anyone before him, and perhaps even after. He will carve a legacy into the very bones of Hong Kong and it will feel like surviving a war, at the end, because he will win this game, every time.

What she gives him is so impossibly dull at first that it’s hard to find enjoyment in any of it, beyond the knowledge that she is challenging him on purpose. In the city he stands out like a sore fucking thumb in all his pale wrongness even surrounded by both British and Chinese, which makes infiltration that much more difficult—and thrilling, he supposes, when they look at him like that, like a stranger. The trick is to embrace it: he is _strange_ , and he plays on their fears, because criminals are never looking for reassurance. They are looking for opportunity.

Tiago gives it to them. In spades he gives it to them, and then he sells them out, because he’s not allowed to kill them yet.

+

Station H is home and she keeps him there while he kicks in a niche for himself and carves out a reputation. He is already a child of three houses and he could care less where he’s put so long as he’s got something to do, and she must know that; she has other agents for other places, and Tiago best serves in the city of glass, where he can shatter it all with a bullet, or a keystroke. There are times he thinks perhaps they’re onto him, but all he ever sees when he stares into the black sea of cyberspace is the seductive yawn of possibility. Nobody knows what he does, until they do, but even that’s by design.

“For _Christ’s_ sake, Rodriguez, leave the hacking to Q Branch!” She throws a file down on the desk in front of him and his eyes follow it, catching the intelligence heading: _Chinese weapons program leaked by anonymous source_ —about time they noticed; he’d had fun with that. “I hired an agent, not a bloody computer criminal!”

Only he’s both, now. 

“Please, you have nothing to worry about.” Well. Details. “I covered my tracks. Your secrets are safe.” 

“I don’t care what you bloody covered. If any of this gets traced back to MI6—”

“Then it’s lucky I know what I’m doing,” he interrupts.

“I know you think we must all be old-fashioned,” she tells him coldly, “but you are not the only technological genius in the world. When things take a turn, for better or for worse, we notice, and if we notice, you can be damn sure we won’t be the only ones who do. You’re lucky I don’t put a burn notice out on you this instant.”

He doesn’t drop her gaze, and doesn’t smile, not with his mouth. 

“I’m flattered you think I deserve one.”

“You shouldn’t be. The object is to avoid drawing attention, not encourage it. Only a complete fucking _imbecile_ would do such a thing.” 

She pauses, and her voice seems to lose its razor edge. “Still. We did wonder about that program.”

Tiago allows himself to smile, and this time, it meets his eyes. “I thought so.”

“Don’t act beyond your brief again, Rodriguez. I won’t be so lenient next time.” She flips open the file and withdraws a single piece of paper, handing it to him. He looks down, and his blood runs cold, and then impossibly hot: it’s a kill order, his first.

“Now get out of my sight before I change my mind.”

“Ma’am,” Tiago says, tight-chested, and does just that.

Within a week, he’s standing over a dead body with its blood all over his face and neck like war paint. Sometimes, slitting someone’s throat with their own knife is the only way to get the job done, especially when you lose your gun in a fistfight. Sometimes, the old ways are the best, even if they’re tedious.

His hand doesn’t shake when he drops the thing in the nearest garbage, or when he runs his fingers under the tap to clean them off. When he leaves, he drapes his own bloodied coat over the body in a parody of affection, tucking in the corners and dabbing away the stray flecks dotting its face; nobody will know it’s a corpse until they smell it.

He calls it in and doesn’t look back.

One down. One to go.

+

It’s not just water torture. That would be boring. 

It’s been about a month of this and Tiago is tired, so fucking tired. They started slipping drugs into his food days ago and he can feel the sluggishness in his bones, the haze in his head that won’t let him think clearly. He’d tried to ration himself, stave off, but hunger is an irrational thing and they’re starving him until his ribs show; he can’t not eat the food or drink the water, but he does try, at least, to be mindful about how he consumes it. Slowly, so slowly. Even though the urge to gorge himself on what little they give him is almost overwhelming, he knows how to care for his body, and does what he can to preserve it.

In the second month they bring in a pair of headphones and a walkman and make him listen to horrible, screaming music at extreme volumes for three hours, five hours, sometimes ten hours a day, with no change in disc or artist, until his ears ring and slick wax coats the insides. Sometimes, it’s not music; it’s just screaming. They tie him down and drip water onto his face so he can’t sleep, so he’ll go quietly mad. They hit him when his eyes begin to fall shut. (They hit him anyway, but he likes to attribute reason to the rhyme, at least.)

Psychosis, he remembers. A side effect of sensory bombardment. Anxiety. Depression. Impaired memory. High suggestibility.

He’s going on eighty hours of not being allowed to sleep when he starts hallucinating, and at first, it’s just noise. He imagines people of indeterminate origin and timbre speaking to him in short little bursts. He comes to a point in his exhaustion where he is wide awake and wouldn’t be able to sleep if he tried; the guards leave him alone then, and take the headphones, and untie him, and he tries to figure out what’s real and what’s not, but he’s too tired to care one way or the other, and besides, it’s almost a kind of refuge, a welcome familiarity—it’s always about _remembering _, isn’t it, what you have and what you don’t. In places like these all you have are your memories.__

Or whatever else your brain gives you.

“Tiago,” she says. “Go to bed early tonight, okay?”

Her hands are on his face, lighter than air, but he can’t see her at all.

“I’ll try, Mother,” he replies, without opening his mouth. She hits him close-fisted and her hair turns white and her lips thin and hits him again, and this time, when he speaks, he means it.

+

They say the second one is easier. They’re right.

This time, his hand does shake, but it’s only adrenaline. The shot goes wide and he has to make up for it with his bare hands but the target still dies, even if it isn’t nice and clean. Tiago will remember much later how it had felt to drown someone, and he’ll understand, at least in part, why it is the Chinese liked it so much. But for now, he watches the bubbles fly from the man’s lips as he struggles to surface, to get purchase on the slippery porcelain of the bathtub, and feels the life drain from underneath his fingertips, and thinks about glass shattering—and wonders if people will be able to see death in his face when they look, or if nothing will have changed at all.

+

It’s not—lust. Not in the traditional sense. But he supposes, that if he had to name it, it would come down to power; in most of his dreams, she is the one holding him down, pressing hard until all his breath leaves him, and sometimes, on the cusp of waking, the world turns to fire around them. Sometimes, he even enjoys it.

It’s not about happiness, or even attraction. He is her tool, her weapon, and she uses him like one. He will not cross that line with her. He is ambiguous, and opportunistic, but he is not stupid enough to assume she cares for his humanity any more than he does hers.

Still. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

(Maybe he is that stupid.)

+

One day, they sit him down in the chair and drag in a woman. She’s naked, like he is, unbound and thin, and perhaps she was even beautiful once—before drugs or torture or worse—and he looks up at her and sees in her deadened eyes the same fear he feels every time he hears his cell door scrape open, the same resigned dread. She’s not shaking. She’s not anything. She’s accepted it; she’s going to die today, and Tiago knows it, just as she does. 

They have a silent understanding, a shared look that isn’t forgiveness, but—pain, a mutual agreement. He watches as they make her kneel in front of him, shoving her down on her knees, and she doesn’t even fight it—doesn’t care to react at all, except bend her head to do what they brought her here for. 

Tiago knows what they want from him. Humiliation, helplessness, lowered defenses. This is just another rung on the ladder into Hell; no holds barred, nothing held back. He can’t afford to let this mean something; just like everything else, it’s only a method, only a weapon.

He doesn’t enjoy it. Doesn’t want it. Both of them are silent; the room is silent, except for the obscene noise of spit against flesh. He hates himself with such acidic rawness that it’s difficult to make her job easier—and he thinks maybe she hates him too, for being the man she has to die for, for having to work harder for it. The guards are watching for his reaction, but he doesn’t give it to them; they adjust themselves in their trousers with blank faces as the muscles in his legs tighten, as his hips lift, and then relax. Sick. He feels sick.

She sits back, swallows, and one of them steps forward. “I hope you enjoyed that,” he says, in accented English, and then blows her brains out onto his thighs.

+

It’s 1997, and the woman now known only as M receives six agents in return for his head, a deal that seems almost too good to be true. The Chinese let him read the document solidifying her promotion as section chief for the decision to let him go, and a copy of the written trade agreement with her signature at the bottom.

It hurts like cancer hurts: a shock at first, and then with a slow, burning acceptance, until it begins to carve him out, until there’s nothing left to do but give up. After months of suffering, the confirmation doesn’t come as a surprise, not really; she had told him from the start that agents don’t have a very long life expectancy, and to be prepared to give his life at any moment. But he should have known that she’d only shorten it. He should have known.

Crushing despair turns quickly to impossible, consuming anger, a rage so sick and tormented that he sits in stifled silence for hours, until it builds and builds and then something snaps and flies out of control like taut frayed wire past its breaking point and he howls at the walls of his filthy cage of concrete and would thrash inside it if he had the strength to move; a broken noise from a broken man, something inhuman, a noise that nobody sane could ever make.

Then he throws his head back and laughs, and for a beautiful, horrible moment, he is both terrified and relieved, and, then—

They find him on the floor, froth and blood down his chin and his cheek and the cold concrete. His mouth is open, a rotted cave where teeth and bone used to be, and the skin stretched loosely over it, still sizzling; the smell is terrible, and his eyes are closed, and beside his head lie the broken remains of a false molar.

They dispose of the body they think is a corpse, and that’s that.

+

—Only it’s not, really.

He wakes up on a fishing boat off the coast of Guangdong, on a surgeon’s table. 

They’d found him floating face-up somewhere in the South China Sea, and had to hold him down while he’d screamed and thrashed at the injustice of it, of being alive, of waking up from what he’d meant to be inescapable finality. Even in that, she had failed him; even now she won’t let him die.

He’d been too weak to resist for very long; the boat’s doctor had dosed him with something to help with the pain, and he’d slipped back into the blessed relief of darkness, at least for a while. They don’t ask how or why; they don’t ask about his fresh bruising, his open wounds, layered like strokes on a newly stretched canvas; his missing fingernails, the part of his jaw that’s no longer there; they don’t ask, and the man who had once been Tiago Rodriguez is thankful, at least, for that one small mercy.

They call him Wúmíng— _Nameless._ It’s good enough for now; he’s nobody, with nothing except his anger, not any more, and not yet—not on this boat, at least, but who knows.

The doctor wraps his ribs and gives him a salve for the cuts and the bruises, bandages and dresses them, and every day he washes his mouth with iodine-tainted water, and drinks pureed fish through a straw because he can’t stand the taste of rice. He can’t move for five days, staring at the ceiling in utter silence as his muscles fight to knit themselves back together. It’s two weeks until they shore in to sell their haul, and by that time he’s healed enough to walk with little pain, and to help the fishermen with the nets. He won’t work in the the rain, though; it feels too much like drowning.

They ship into the Port of Guangzhou, and he helps them discharge their cargo as meagre thanks before walking away for good, a scarf and a hood all there is between his shattered face and sunken eye and the rest of the world. He’s thirty and he should be dead, but he isn’t, and he has to live with that—he needs to live with it, long enough to see her face again, because there is no other reason why he should be standing here, right now, if not for her, if not for everything she’s done to him.

Two hours and one public library computer later he has a place to stay, sufficient funds scraped off the top of a series of offshore bank accounts he doesn’t own, a name of a cosmetic surgeon, a name of a tailor, and a name of someone who’ll make him fake papers, for a price. Some of the money goes toward a personal computer—Microsoft’s newest, for now, the best there is and the best he can wrangle—and the rest to medical supplies, lotions and bandages and pills. A hospital visit would be too risky, and there’s nothing wrong with him (physically) that can’t be fixed with time and care and supplies, and right now, he’d rather die a second time than trust his body to anyone else. So he stabs himself with needles and washes himself with damp, rough-edged sponges, because the idea of standing under a shower makes the bile rise in the back of his throat, even if wetting his hair in the sink isn’t much better.

He spends one month in Guangzhou in a shitty hotel turning himself human again, at least on the outside. What the surgeon makes for him is neither comfortable nor pretty but it does the trick, fills his face in, at least—he can eat solid foods again even if the act of chewing is almost more painful than it’s worth. The name on his passport is a step up from John Doe, just barely, a _Mr Juan Rivera_ , but he can’t afford to be picky. He’ll take what he can get, and he only needs them to get out of China back to Spain, where he can at least recuperate on his own terms, in his own language. 

Each day his bandages peel off with less and less effort, and all his wounds turn pinker, fading from angry gashes to thin, aching reminders; each day he lives he travels farther from being a raw, open wound. Soon the scab will fall away, and he’ll just be a scar of a man, covered in new skin—but even his deepest scars won’t be visible ones. Those, he thinks, will never heal.

When the year turns over, all his injuries have healed, his nails have grown back thick with supplements of fish oil, he can stand up straight again without his ribs screaming at him in protest, his ankle supports his full weight, and the sight of water no longer makes his breath rush into his lungs like they’re dying for it. His hair is long, so he cuts it. He shaves with a disposable razor. Runs his hands with and against the grain of his face, pressing at the bare flesh. He looks in the mirror for the first time in six months and doesn’t recognise himself. 

The only thing that connects this present shell with its past is the clear sharpness of his pale eyes, the colour of his skin and his hair, but even then it seems as though they’re a mask, something stretched thin above the seething mass of charred residue underneath. He is inhuman, and yet, in some ways, more human than he had ever been before.

He doesn’t know what he is yet, but he knows what he wants. Patience, as they say, is a virtue, and when he gets to her, finally, when he _finally_ sees her face again, it will be because he waited. And good things come to those who wait, or so he’s been told.

So he books a flight, gets on a plane, and leaves. 

It’s as easy, and as difficult, as that.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh man, bear with me. Notes in order as they appear in the fic:
> 
> 1 — Though Javier Bardem is 43, Silva is 45 here (a year older than Bond at the time of Skyfall), because otherwise he would have been serving in Hong Kong at the age of 17, which couldn’t have happened due to the British Army’s age requirements. Also, in _Moonraker_ , it’s revealed that agents are required to retire at the age of 45. (Which is not necessarily true for James Bond himself, but for the sake of parallels, I am just saying.)  
> 2 — Young British Army recruits start at the Army Foundation College (AFC) Harrogate and then, for Infantry training, transfer to Infantry Training Centre (ITC) Catterick. I think.  
> 3 — The MSS (Ministry of State Security) is the security agency of the People's Republic of China, and (I would assume) works a little something like MI5. According to Article 4 of the Criminal Procedure Law, the MSS can detain people for unsanctioned crimes against state security.  
> 4 — 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards are an elite Foot Guards regiment generally serving Her Majesty the Queen. They were stationed in Hong Kong in ’86; their tour lasted until ’88. Their nickname is the Lilywhites, and their motto is ‘Nulli Secundus’, or Second to None.  
> 5 — _Guero_ : a Spanish slang term for a fair skinned or light haired person, sometimes derogatory.  
> 6 — James Bond was also eleven when his parents died. Parallels!  
> 7 — _True Faith_ , a 1987 hit by New Wave band New Order. [♫](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzeNAUOp17c)  
> 8 — Room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984 is a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love, where the Party attempts to subject prisoners to everything they hate and fear. The worst fear of the novel's protagonist is to be attacked by rats. 101 is also the number on Silva’s police uniform in _Skyfall._


End file.
